60 years later, gang leader’s slaying still unsolved

Friday

Oct 26, 2007 at 12:01 AM

Carl Shelton, who led Prohibition crime ring in Peoria with brother, was killed 60 years ago this week

FrankRadosevich II

Few Peorians likely recognize the once-infamous name. Even fewer recall the swift and violent end of Carl Shelton as he traveled near Fairfield. But 60 years ago on Oct. 23, when Shelton’s body was found on a dirt road peppered with bullets, the death of this feared Peoria gang leader made national headlines. “Carl Shelton Slain; Led Prohibition Gang,” exclaimed a headline from the New York Times.

“Shelton, 60 (actually, he was 59), was blasted out of a Jeep by machine-gun slugs fired by the gunmen from a black Sedan on a country road near his rich farmlands,” read a front-page story in the Peoria Star.

“Fifteen to 20 slugs hit him with such force he toppled over into a ditch, his head, body and legs riddled.”

During the 1940s, Shelton was a household name in Peoria. Words like “notorious,” “infamous” or “bloody” often preceded it. Words like “boys,” “brothers” or “gang” often followed it. They gained that reputation from controlling scores of slot machines, extracting fees and using force to make sure they were paid. Before his assassins fired one last barrage, Shelton supposedly recognized one of the gunmen and pleaded with him, saying: “Don’t shoot me any more, Charlie. It’s me, Carl Shelton. You’ve killed me already.”

Nine months later, his younger brother and partner in crime, Bernie, met a similar fate when a single bullet cut him down as he walked out of his Parkway Tavern on Farmington Road.

To this day, both slayings remain unsolved. Six decades have taken their toll on the once-commanding Shelton family. Since much of the Sheltons’ history comes from personal accounts, backroom gossip or the rumor mill, a good deal of the story has been lost over the years.

Members of the generation who heard the stories or maybe met the brothers themselves are dying off, taking their memories with them and leaving the legacy of the rough-and-tumble boys in limbo.

“A lot of people don’t know about them now,” said Bill Adams, author of “The Shelton Gang: They Played in Peoria” as well as a weekly history column for the Journal Star. “Right now you can go to young people and talk about the Sheltons and they don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

To older Peorians, however, the gangland stories of the Sheltons still resonate and mesmerize. People share their “Shelton stories” passed down from earlier generations. Books keep the old yarns alive and tours covering the Sheltons’ glory days still draw a crowd. “People want to read about that kind of thing,” Adams said.

“It’s a romanticism of that kind of living I guess. It’s not the everyday average guy that takes a lunch pail to Caterpillar. It’ll fade away, but it will still always be there.”

Before coming to the river city, Carl Shelton’s deeds were already the stuff of legends. News accounts told of his bootlegging exploits and battles with rival groups in southern Illinois. When he clashed with Charlie Birger — another legendary gangster from the area known as Little Egypt — it was said to involve machine guns, armored cars and homemade bombs dropped from planes.

“They were always a family that was in trouble,” Adams said of Carl and Bernie. “Their dad wouldn’t speak to them, but their mother thought they could do nothing wrong — one of those kinds of families. I guess they proved their dad right.”

A ‘wide-open town’ when Carl Shelton reached Peoria about 1938, he and Bernie began muscling their way into the city’s lucrative gambling racket. No stranger to graft and vice, Peoria provided a fertile playground for the brothers.

“We’re a bawdy, wonderful, wide-open town,” said local historian Norman Kelly, whose most recent book, “Until You Are Dead,” chronicles 10 of Peoria’s most notable murder cases. “This was the place. We had every conceivable thing you wanted here.”

At the time, Edward N. Woodruff, who served 24 years as mayor before being ousted, sought to contain and control vice rather than suppress and smother it. Under his reign, brothels dotted streets, taverns defied Prohibition and gambling houses thrived.

“Peoria was this wide-open town, which the Sheltons just took advantage of,” said Bernie Drake of the Peoria Historical Society. “We had Mayor Woodruff who had what was called the ‘Peoria liberal attitude,’ which was you could never do away with vice so what you do is you keep it all in one place so everyone knows where it’s at and you tax it. … We were probably a little bit of a Las Vegas before Las Vegas ever existed.”

‘They were ruthless’ Carl Shelton was the brains of the operation.

Described as soft-spoken, tactful and businesslike, he collected fees from gamblers and provided protection from competitors. His brother Bernie was the brawn. By 1941, people were fond of mentioning that you couldn’t spit on the sidewalk without first asking a Shelton for permission. Not everyone shares this view of the Sheltons as bloody, devious mobsters.

“They’re not gangsters,” Kelly said. “They were just guys with a reputation.” The Sheltons, Kelly contends, were not the heavy-handed group who forced the city’s already well-established gambling racket to bow before them. The brothers came to Peoria for a slice of the pie and not to rule the city with an iron fist.

“There was more machine gun fire in your mom’s bathroom than Peoria, Illinois,” Kelly said. However, many still feel the gang had a presence in Peoria. “They were not afraid to get involved in a fight and certainly they had people killed,” Drake said.

“The truth of the matter was that if they had to be ruthless, they could be ruthless and they were ruthless.” ‘Sea of change’

What is agreed upon is that when Carl O. Triebel was elected as a “reform” mayor in 1946, the tide began to turn. Tired of the city’s crude image, Triebel cracked down on gambling, and Carl Shelton — perhaps tired of life in the underworld or genuinely feeling threatened — yielded quietly to the new mayor.

He returned to his farm in Wayne County, where some suspect his neighbor killed him over a bitter, long-standing grudge. After Peoria switched its system of government, its free-wheeling days came to a close.

The city, once run by influential and, at times, crooked elected leaders, now was led by an independent city manager. “We kind of turned our backs on those wide-open days of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s that the Sheltons were part of,” Drake said. “That was really a sea of change in Peoria.”

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